


Chase's End

by needleyecandy



Category: Thor - All Media Types
Genre: M/M, Seduction, Vampire Hunters, Vampires
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-03-21
Updated: 2016-03-21
Packaged: 2018-05-28 04:43:48
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,693
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/6315397
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/needleyecandy/pseuds/needleyecandy
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>It was time for the hunter to find him.</p><p>Time to choose him.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Chase's End

**Author's Note:**

> I started this for the 'bodily fluids' prompt of the 30 day porn challenge, but decided I liked it better pornless. Enjoy!

The hunter had been pursuing him for nearly seven years now, and oh, how Loki had led him a merry dance. They had gone twice to Styria, of course, and through the heart of Wallachia into the forests of Transylvania - far blacker than any he had ever seen in Bavaria - but also to places the hunter would never have guessed: into the heart of social London, the dazzling lights of Paris, through the winding streets of Bologna. He liked to think that the hunter appreciated these sojourns into the unexpected.

He wanted the man to like him. He wanted there to be no regrets.

Every moment since the hunter first picked up his trail had been unending delight, and Loki was loathe to bid it farewell. But the hunter was mortal, and he could not maintain this forever. Still, each day Loki had put it off just one more day. He would never have this again, and it was _such_ a pleasure.

And now it was time for it to end.

He sat quietly at the table as he waited. The dark wood had been revarnished so many times it would have been impossible for a mortal to read the deepest layers of carvings. He touched them as he read them, bringing to his mind images of those who had held the knives. _Brother Thomas farts like a dog,_ a frightened-laughing novice had inscribed, when this was the rectory table of a monastery. _Here Joseph fucked Annabella for three scudi_ , dug into it by a man who certainly could not have fucked her for free, after the table had been sold to a tavern.

He took out his penknife. The hunter was making him wait. He liked to play games, too. Loki liked that about him.

 _In this castle Loki claimed Thor the hunter and made him my own_ , he carved.

"That's rather presumptuous, don't you think?" Thor said behind him. His voice echoed in the barren chamber.

"You could have killed me while I wrote, and you did not," Loki said without turning."But then, it is not like you to stab a man in the back."

"You are no man," Thor said bitterly.

"Yet were I a beast, you would have felled me long ago."

"No, you are a thing too foul to be something of nature."

"And still I sit here waiting for your blade, and still you do not kill me."

Thor made no answer.

"Silent? Very well, I will not mock you with it. Did you like my gifts?"

"Waste and fripperies," Thor said.

"Oh, no, not at all," Loki breathed. "You would have died that night in Graz, had I not marked you mine. And how would you have fed yourself, had I not provided? Surely you can feel the strength my food has given you." At that he turned to face the hunter.

Thor stood in the doorway. His hair had been blond with the sun when he began to hunt Loki. After years of night, his natural light brown had replaced it. He had filled out, though, so gloriously, just as Loki had said. It was as though an entire childhood of scarcity had been erased by his gifts.

"And when you attended Queen Charlotte's ball, those clothes that made you so elegant the footmen instantly accepted your claim to nobility? Were those fripperies? You could not have followed me without them."

"Tell me what is this game you play," Thor said, taking a step towards him.

"It is no game. Or if it is, it is not one of my invention. All I did was give you everything you wanted."

"What I _want_ is your death."

Loki shrugged. "At first, perhaps. But you stopped desiring that long ago. Have you not noticed? It was not long after you fell in love with me."

"In love? You speak madness," Thor scoffed.

"Ah!" Loki held one finger up to ask for silence. "I saw you, that day in the library."

Thor didn't have to ask which day. It was clear on his face.

"You should never have been a mere hunter, and you know it. Humanity is riddled with error. My kind offer the only true meritocracy."

"Meritocracy?"

"We turn the deserving. We kill the undeserving. No accidents of birth, no petty jests of fate. Is not this way better?"

Loki rose to his feet. Thor was roughly dressed, a deerskin jacket over a homespun shirt, tied loosely at the neck. His hair was filthy, laden with twigs and leaves and pulled futilely back. He had taken three days to reach this castle, tramping through the forest, avoiding the road, sleeping rough. His coarseness, the dirt, even the smell of his exertion, were unspeakably arousing, now that he was here. Loki's delicate senses were flooded: Thor was leather and dirt where Loki was velvet and lace. He could have swooned.

"Better?" Thor said. "You kill to survive."

"And how many have died in your pursuit of me? You are relentless. Unstoppable. I love you too, you know."

Thor said nothing.

"You're so tired," Loki said gently. He moved nearer and smoothed back the hair that fell across Thor's brow. "I offer you rest."

"You offer me slavery," Thor protested. He was weakening. Loki could hear it in his voice, could see it in how Thor turned his face into the touch.

"No, no," Loki told him, shaking his head. "I do no more than offer you the completion to that which you yourself have started. The transformation into a truly superior being." He had the power to put his will into his voice, to make people come to him begging. He was careful not to use it now. This had to be purely Thor's choice, or there would be no sweetness to it.

Thor made a faint sound of protest. He really was too tired to think. There would be no savor in a triumph tonight.

"Anyone could be a slave. I want more," Loki said, his voice soft as air.

He took Thor's hand and drew him in, into the room, up the stairs.

Thor watched as Loki filled the broad tub with a wave of his hand. The water rose and rose until it was full, and with a nod of his head he finished it with a scattering of flower petals. "I can taste your weariness. Rest," he soothed.

"I am in no mood for tricks," Thor said.

"I offer you kindness, and you accuse me," Loki said. His voice was carefully pitched; to Thor's left ear it sounded hurt, to his right, mocking. It was a skill that had taken centuries to perfect.

He could _see_ the moment Thor's resistance failed. When the lure of hot water and relaxation after days of the most brutal hardships grew stronger than the fear of death.

Loki watched as Thor undressed with his back to the wall and stepped into the bath. He could not stifle the sigh of pleasure as it swirled around his aching and blistered feet. Loki listened and remembered what it was to feel drunk.

Thor sank down into it, kneeling, then sitting, then, almost against his own will, lying down so that his head alone was still above. His cautious eyes did not leave Loki for one instant. That was just as he wanted it.

"Shall I amuse you?" he asked, producing a book from thin air. "Or perhaps you wish for someone to wash your hair." The book and his jacket vanished alike, leaving him in shirtsleeves of so thin a fabric that not only the shape but the shade of his delicate nipples showed through. Thor saw them and glanced away quickly, but not so quickly that Loki missed the dilation of his pupils.

Loki circled to the head of the tub, Thor twisting to track him as he moved. He knelt and wetted his hands next to Thor’s shoulder before picking up the bar of soap and lathering. “I won’t harm you. I already told you; I love you.” Doubt flickered across Thor’s face, but he couldn’t help leaning back into Loki’s touch as he began to lather his filthy hair. It needed four washings, in total. Halfway through the third, Thor lost the last shreds of resistance and closed his eyes. The touch was so gentle and caring, and he had been alone so long.

Thor gave a start when Loki’s soapy hands slid down his neck to work away the grime, and further, beneath the water, to swirl over his broad chest. “Just look what you have made of yourself, Thor,” Loki whispered into his ear. “Look what you have built out of nothingness, and now you are at your prime, this body at its most perfect. What a shame it would be, to let it age and decay. And your mind… come to me, and you can build your mind as you have built your form. Think of all an immortal can learn. Where your body has reached its peak, your intellect has no such limits... I speak twenty two languages, and am currently learning two more. If the study of languages is not to your taste, I can conduct the most advanced experiments in biology, chemistry, and optics, and have skill enough in the other sciences to pass as a doctor. I draft blueprints of the most magnificent castles, simply for the pleasure of imagining." He softened his voice still further more, so that his words were barely more than air. "Come to me, and you can read the contents of every library in existence; you can see the farthest limits of the earth; you can revel in this body forever. Imagine this body filled with the strength of my kind."

Thor's nipples had gone so taut beneath Loki's hands one might have thought the water full of ice. Loki could not help wondering if they were all that had reacted, and with a wave of his hand the gray filmy water was replaced by water that was perfectly clear. There were no flowers this time to shield his view. Thor opened his eyes to find Loki peering into the bath, and he stared at him boldly, making no move to hide his erection.

Their eyes met and held, Thor blinking too much and Loki too little, until Thor was seized by a yawn he could not suppress.

"I prepared a bed for you. Stand," Loki told him.

Thor stood reluctantly and Loki wrapped a huge towel around him, drying him from the crown of his head to the tops of his knees before offering him a stabilizing arm against the slippery tub as he stepped out.

Loki knelt and dried his feet as he spoke. "When the sun sets tonight, watch it carefully, and when I wake you must tell me of it. I had no one to caution me to remember my last sunset, and now it was so long ago that the memory is quite lost from my mind. Tell me of it, that you may remember too."

"It will not be my last sunset," Thor objected with a frown.

"Oh, but it will. Can't you even tell that you've already decided? You decided long ago."

Thor frowned again, but he was so tired he couldn't think, and Loki was intentionally playing with him, and the bath had been so relaxing and Loki's voice so seductive.

Loki rose to his feet and wrapped a warm robe around Thor that certainly had not been there a moment before. "Come. Your bedroom is this way."

Thor followed him with leaden feet as they went back down, through long halls until they reached the castle chapel. A narrow bed covered with heavy blankets stood just inside the door, the foot just on the threshold. He looked at Loki quizzically.

"It's still sanctified. That is as far as I could push the bed. I told you, I have no desire to have you against your will."

"How do I know you're telling the truth?"

“Alas, that is a thing that can be known only in retrospect. But you are too tired not to rest. Goodnight, Thor." Loki rose to his toes and brushed a soft kiss across Thor's cheek. Thor received it without protest, and stood watching silently as Loki faded away into the shadows.

He had made his nest in the lowest level of the dungeons. It was simple, for he needed little. Just a blanket to soften the hardness of the flagstones as he waited for dawn. It came quickly and brought with it oblivion.

When he woke, he found Thor, as he expected, in the library. He had not chosen this castle at random. The late baron had been a book collector of some renown, so when he and all within the castle were taken by a foul illness, Loki had claimed it as his territory. There were bodies to be gotten rid of, leaking and stinking, but he reined in his normal fastidiousness and dealt with them. The northwest face of the castle looked down upon a churning river. It carried them and their ruined mattresses far away. And then Loki was alone in his castle with his books, waiting for the hunter to follow.

"What are you reading?" Loki asked.

"Basile," Thor answered. He still wore the heavy robe, and he was curled up in one of the window seats with his bare feet on the worn velvet cushion. The reflection of the candles in his torchiere flickered and danced in the warped panes behind him.

"A good choice. I find these children's tales to bear more truths than most care to admit. How long do you expect it will take you to finish this book?"

Thor looked at it. "Perhaps a day."

"And how long to read all these?" Loki asked, turning to look at the tall shelves that surrounded them.

"Impossible. And I know what you are going to say, and there is no purpose to it," Thor said, holding his hand up.

"Then you have decided."

"I have decided nothing."

Loki smiled and approached him. He knelt at Thor's feet and let his head fall to one side. "You are armed. I can smell the iron of your weapon hidden in your pocket. If you wish to kill me, then kill me."

Thor stared at him, a thousand emotions washing across his face. Loki leaned forward and pressed a kiss against his cheek. "I thought not. I trust you found the kitchens?"

"I did. There is mold everywhere."

"Were you able to find enough?"

"I did."

"And you slept well?"

"Very."

"Which tale are you reading?"

"The Serpent," Thor answered.

Loki kissed him again. "Find me when you have finished it." He rose and slipped into the shadows, smiling as he watched Thor's eyes search fruitlessly for him before returning to his book. Loki withdrew to the room below and sat in silence, waiting. The floor creaked above him. Thor had finished the tale, and was now walking through the library. Not to the door, though. No, he was circling, staying to the edges of the room, moving so slowly... reading the spines. Taking in all that could be his, if only he gave in to the urgings of his heart.

It was nearly dawn when he descending and found Loki. "Will you come with me?" he asked.

"Of course." Loki rose and followed him.

Thor led him to the chapel and continued in while Loki stopped on the threshold. Thor grabbed his arm and pulled hard, surprising him, and though he jerked his arm away he wasn't fast enough. The moment his skin touched the boundary it began to smoke and blister and he was hit with a wave of nausea like he had never thought to know again. He fell against the wall, gasping in pain, cradling the arm to his chest.

Thor stood just inside the chapel, just within the sacred space, and looked at him. "I just had to know that first," he said. He stepped back out and offered his throat.


End file.
